Hard Days And Nights

“Youth in Revolt” and “Sweetgrass.”

The hero of “Youth in Revolt” is called Nick Twisp (Michael Cera), and much of the movie is about becoming, or trying to become, the kind of person who wouldn’t be called Nick Twisp. This is not easy, since one look at Nick will confirm that, in the eyes of the world, he is the quintessence of Twispiness: well-mannered, light of voice, and as thin as a grebe. He lives with his mother, Estelle (Jean Smart), and she in turn lives with whoever, or whatever, takes her fancy: someone like Jerry (Zach Galifianakis), who is basically a beer gut with a missing conscience and a wandering mind, or Officer Wescott (Ray Liotta), a cop who delivers the sad news of Jerry’s apparent demise, and stays around to provide Estelle with extra consolation. Such men are icons of civic diligence compared to Nick’s dad, George (Steve Buscemi), who resides elsewhere, and whose opening whine of thanks to his latest girlfriend (“Oh, you made me a snack!”) tells you all you need to know.

The film, directed by Miguel Arteta, is based on C. D. Payne’s original novel, in which Nick is a lad of fourteen. Here he looks a couple of years older—a legally wise alteration, since he not only spends the movie dreaming of sex but ends up having it. The book was an unsurprising hit among teen-agers, who always rejoice to be told of the exact degree to which their parents’ generation can be measured as total losers or flat-out creeps. It is written in the first person, a style that is preserved onscreen in voice-over—the ideal form of address, surely, for any self-admiring, self-berating teen-ager. “In the movies, the good guy gets the girl. In real life, it’s usually the prick,” Nick tells us, as he is dissed by a female schoolmate in a video store while holding a copy of “La Strada.” The tang of narcissism is most pronounced in his intellectual pride. We sense it as the camera surveys the crammed bookshelves of his room, although Nick’s conspiratorial boast—“I am a voracious reader of classic prose”—is in many ways a risk. Having shown us his hand, he never really bothers to play it for the rest of the film; a classic bookworm would continue to drop authors’ names, striving to shape and refine all experience into a sheaf of short stories—to treat life as fit, or fit only, for literary criticism, most likely with calamitous results. The ur-text of this tendency is “The Rachel Papers,” Martin Amis’s first novel, still unsurpassed in its plumbing of pre-college precocity, but Arteta cannot hold his nerve as Amis does, perhaps for fear of frightening an audience of bibliophobes, and so he settles for the next best thing. Nick, we soon realize, is not a reader, or even a Fellini fan. He is someone who would like to read, or like to be thought of as a reader. The voracity is there, but he doesn’t eat.

By a happy chance, he finds someone with a comparable hunger. On vacation with Estelle and Jerry, in a greasy mobile home near a lake, Nick meets Sheeni Saunders (Portia Doubleday), a lofty lass who fells our hero with a glance. We see his enraptured face in the shower immediately afterward, the water bouncing off him in slow motion. (Anybody who has seen “Antichrist” will suspect a spoof here.) Sheeni greets him later with “Hi, stuck-up!,” although she has snobbish delusions of her own, visible in the images of Jean-Paul Belmondo on her walls. Again, however, the movie fails to honor its commitment; where the real Belmondo, in “Breathless,” took Humphrey Bogart as his god, and followed through on the implications of his worship, Sheeni’s fancy is no more than a vague nod in the general direction of Frenchness. She claims that her boyfriend, Trent (Jonathan B. Wright), speaks fluent French and writes “Futurist percussive poetry,” but when we finally meet this paragon he’s just another jock with a silky haircut. What is being set up, in short, is not a genuine culture clash; youth, whatever the title suggests, is not really in revolt, foisting its lyrical ambitions on a prosaic, shockable world. Here, for the umpteenth time, is the tale of a nerd who wants to get laid.

The telling of the tale, to be fair, has patches of sprightliness and zip. I liked the animation that kicks in at irregular moments: stop-motion models of the main characters, for example, in the opening credits, plus a breezy sequence in which Nick, stoned on magic mushrooms, peruses a sex manual, only for its illustrations to float upward from the page and flap around him like butterflies—tiny, hand-drawn couples, rocking back and forth in space. Note that intercourse is viewed by Arteta as infinitely gripping in the buildup, and strangely sweet when it occurs (close to cute, in Nick’s case), with no hint of sweat or embarrassment. I can’t remember a recent film, not even a Harry Potter episode, that cleaved with so little doubt to the cause of adolescence, leaving all unsavory practices to the grownups. This reaches a vengeful climax when Sheeni’s father (M. Emmet Walsh), a grumpy God-fearer, is tricked into sharing the magic mushrooms, and winds up slowly caking his face with mashed potatoes. That will get a big laugh, but I caught a smear of cruelty, too. In Twispworld, it’s not enough to ignore your elders; you have to turn them back into babies.

In addition to the cartoons, and a lively score, “Youth in Revolt” has one more trick up its sleeve. Inspired by Sheeni’s prejudice, Nick declares, “I’ve decided to create a supplementary persona named François Dillinger.” This means a proper alter ego: not the devilish adviser—Bogart again—who sits opposite Woody Allen in “Play It Again, Sam” and tells him how to get the girl, but a lightly customized Twisp, played by Cera, complete with mustache, shades, buttoned-down blue shirt, white pants, deck shoes, and no socks. More nautical preppy than Gallic, to be honest, and it’s a true disappointment to watch the conceit fall flat. Top marks to Arteta for being the first director to produce a post-“Avatar” avatar, and it’s not his fault, on a slimline budget, if the secondary Nick isn’t nine feet tall with golden Bambi eyes and a complexion the color of Bombay Sapphire. On the other hand, the director probably wasn’t banking on his leading man’s being so ruthlessly exposed. Cera can be winning enough, with his flat-toned goofiness, in films like “Superbad,” but there’s only just enough of the guy to fill out one dramatis persona; two at once prove to be beyond him, and, however often Dillinger lounges at the side of the frame, witnessed only by Nick, and offers snarky comments on the action, we never believe in the force of his otherness, let alone his immorality or his cool. Add to this the fact that almost nobody in the adult cast, strong though it is, gets much of a chance to let rip (there should be a law against wasting Steve Buscemi), and you will gather that the movie’s well-meant cheerfulness is in danger of running dry. Fortunately, Portia Doubleday is on hand. Serene, sly, and sixteen, Sheeni seems to be the most mature human in sight, and way too accomplished for our hero. “You’re my François. The one I’ve been looking for,” she says to little Twisp. Oui, oui.

The list of things you won’t get from “Sweetgrass” is almost as impressive as the film itself. No narration, though this is a documentary. No music, unless you count a few snatches of song (“Headin’ home, baby, headin’ home now”), most of them mumbled by an aging fellow on horseback. No way of hearing half the dialogue. No names given for most of the people we meet. No explanatory titles until the end, when we learn that the flock of sheep we have watched being driven over the Beartooth Mountains, in Montana, will be the last. (Economic pressures, one imagines.) And, best of all, no flinching from birth and death.

We already know that farmers don’t have a sniff of sentimentality, but it’s still bracing to see the sheep breeders in this movie drag a newborn by its hind leg across the straw, or slip the skin of a dead lamb, like a sock, over the torso of an orphaned one, in the hope that the bereaved mother will accept it. As for the man who takes a leak in front of a sheep’s fresh corpse, ripped open by a bear, even the Duke, in his “Red River” days, might have scratched his chin in approval. The landscape may be majestic, but the deeds that it cradles teem with complaint and fatigue: we find one shepherd on his cell phone, high on a hilltop, who says of the job, “This is bullshit, Mom,” adding, “I’d rather enjoy these mountains than hate ’em.” The filmmakers, Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, compiled their footage over three years, and they are right to demand a commensurate patience from the audience: they hold the camera on a ruminating beast, or a noisy shearing, dare you to get bored, wait for you to grow hypnotized, and then, just as you enter a sort of trance, abruptly cut. Only thus, perhaps, can we begin to glimpse the rhythm that has, for more than a century, governed these hard, skillful, good-humored American lives, and which has itself been cut short. ♦

Anthony Lane has been a film critic for The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of “Nobody’s Perfect.”